Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Loesch and Breitbart Use Student As Human Shield

Yesterday, after UMSL declared that the highly edited videos Dana Loesch and Andrew Breitbart were pushing were "distorted" and "definitely taken out of context" and the St. Louis media finally started covering the blatant dishonesty, the Breitbartians new spin was to link to a long post on Big Government from the student who had originally leaked the video arguing that the class was biased. I'm sure the student posted of his own accord, and probably though he had good reasons for doing so, but it seems pretty obvious to me that he is being used by people who are trying to deflect blame and cover their own dishonesty.

Basically, the student is severely damaging his own credibility for the sake of minimal gain for anyone other than Loesch and Breitbart. First, video was leaked of his fellow students without their permission, and so openly declaring that he leaked the video with the flimsy excuse that he distributed them "in their entirety to a number of my friends in order to obtain other opinions on the propriety of what occurred in the class" does not present him in a very good light. The student also remained silent for two weeks while clearly dishonestly edited videos were being publicized and pushed around the internet by people he shared the video with, so his coming out with a statement now is not very credible. And his statements don't really add much new information; we already heard the inflammatory selectively edited quotes, and we already saw that they're willing to pick and choose information to push their agenda, so why would the media now want to believe a written account after just being burned by bogus videos? So the student's testimony is extremely unlikely to influence anyone in the media or the broader public other than the fringers at the Breitbart's sites, and the "Right" does not gain anything from his account. In fact, the only people who gain anything are Loesch, Breitbart, and the cronies who (badly) edited the videos: a group that is now fighting for nothing other than "plausible deniability."

On the other hand, the student loses quite a bit by "outing himself" and implicitly condoning the videos. Even though he didn't do the malicious editing himself, and though he clearly wants to look like he's presenting a more balanced view, he is now, for the rest of his life, inextricably linked to the dishonest editing tactics of a few of Breitbart's hacks. They get to use the cover that they were just presenting the information that the student was suggesting, while he is linked to videos that were dishonestly edited by someone else. It really was a pretty unfortunate decision by the student, unless he is planning on working only for people in the future who care nothing about credibility.

The student claims that the class was "biased." Though certain neoMcCarthyists will inevitably agree based solely on the fact that a communist organizer was allowed to present in the class, most people will find the claim to be pretty subjective and will not have the desire to sit through 18 hours of video footage (even if it was available) to see if the class really was "unfair." From what I've seen and heard (including interviewing two students from the class), I don't think the class content was inappropriate. But even if it was, this would in no way justify doctoring videos to falsely claim that professors were "advocating violence" or "teaching industrial sabotage." I can't plant heroin on Andrew Breitbart, call the police, then wait until I get caught to say, "oh well, he doesn't really sell heroin, but I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that he has bad personal hygiene." Lying is lying, distorted video is distorted video, and the student has made a bad mistake of allowing himself to be a fall guy for Loesch and Breitbart, who should really bear the responsibility of pushing fundamentally dishonest information.

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